Russ Miller, Oral History

 

Recorded: May 4, 2019

Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research and Evaluation Bureau

 

[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus, speaking on May 4, 2019, at Kent State University Special Collections and Archives. As part of the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, I’m talking today with Russ Miller, the brother of Jeffrey Miller. Russ, I want to thank you very much for interrupting your activities today and getting to dinner, and meeting with me to tell your story. I’m very grateful, thank you so much.

 

[Russ Miller]: Okay. So, just a little bit of background. I was three years older than my brother. I went to school at Michigan State from, like, ‘64 to ‘68. I remember when he was in high school, when he was sixteen, he came out to Michigan State because he was, at that point, all about, following in his big brother’s footsteps and so he was going to—and he stayed at my fraternity house. I’m almost embarrassed to say fraternity house, because now it almost has a bad name to it. But, at the time, it was a good way to get off campus. So, he stayed there for a week or ten days, or so, and he was “Junior Jew.” [editor’s note: this was considered an endearing nickname for his little brother] Those were good old times. And then, just about the time I graduated, he started.

 

So, when I was a senior, he was a freshman. There was a bit of overlap. But, if you think about the time, this is 1968, fall of ‘68, he’s just kind of growing up. And the Vietnam War is heating up, and he was starting to kind of evolve into the person that he was going to become. He was no longer just some little kid who was following in his big brother’s footsteps. We were always very tight, but that year, I think, I was focused on getting finished with business and getting off to go to start work.

 

He was into everything—I remember he was into rock stuff, and he used to follow Sly and the Family Stone around as a groupie. He went to, I don’t know how many different concerts of theirs. But it was also—we would have these conversations about, you know, he’s going to run off to Canada. I was, at that point, I was the capitalist, and he was the—he was passionate about this war and how it’s wrong. And I was the guy—it’s almost comical to think back about this—but I was the guy that said, “The government must know more than they’re letting on”—that we have to believe some of the shit that they’re telling us. So, I was like, we would kid each other about, like—I was this capitalist and he was much more passionate, and we were at odds. Even though we loved the hell out of each other, we were just completely in different planets.

 

[Interviewer]: Were you studying business? Were you—What was your—

 

[Russ Miller]: I was in engineering. And I ended up becoming an engineer. And there, I think, he probably started the same way I started. You had, like, a no-preference major when you first started. So, he hadn’t even declared, but he was probably going to be psychology or something like that major if he, if he finished. And to be honest with you, I can’t recall what he actually was, as he proceeded through. But I think it was in that psychology area.

 

So, that year went by fast. And then, off I was by January of ‘69, I was in New Jersey working and he was still at school. But he also had a lot of friends from Long Island, where we grew up, that were going to school at Kent. Michigan State stood for everything he wasn’t ready to stand for, and he would go down to Kent to socialize with his friends, for lots of reasons. And I couldn’t even tell you all the real, emotional motivations around that other than the fact that he was—it was a social thing. On the weekends, during that next year of ‘69, he did a lot of travelling down to Kent while he was still going to school at Michigan State. I believe he transferred to Kent, around January 1, of 1970—pretty close to the shootings.

 

Just, fast forward from there, the last time we saw each other, we met in New York at Easter. We double-dated, went into some club in New York and had a good old time—and that was nice. And that was, what, three weeks before the shootings? So, that was a little crazy.

 

May 4, I remember that day. I was really close to my grandmother, she lived in the Bronx, and I had a motorcycle. I needed to take the motorcycle in for a service at a bike shop in Manhattan, and I basically spent the day dropping the bike off and then enjoying the day—nice day—walking around Central Park, having a good old time. And then taking the subway back up to my grandmother’s house to have dinner. Completely oblivious about anything that was going on out here. And I get back there, and maybe I get to her by six o’clock or something like that. It’s obviously all over the TV. She says things like, “Do you think Jeff was in the middle of that?” And I said, “Of course he was in the middle of that.” Because that was right up his alley. But we didn’t know anything more than, you know, kids had been killed and they weren’t naming names yet.

 

Now, in parallel with that, I know my mom had called Jeff’s apartment to check to make sure he was fine and his roommate just blurted it out that he was dead. So, knowing that her mom and I were getting together that evening, and her only thought was, we got to get word to these guys before they hear it on TV. So, she sent my aunt, her sister, came up by subway to the Bronx, to catch up with us and, literally, I remember being in this little three-room apartment, and my aunt knocked on the door and she told my grandmother, and then I heard the gasping, and I ran out there and, literally, fifteen minutes later, they started announcing it on TV. But at least we heard it directly from my—

 

[Interviewer]: From a relative.

 

[Russ Miller]: —from my aunt. So, obviously the rest of the night we’re talking to my mom on the phone and all that stuff. So, it was just—

 

[Interviewer]: Where was your mother? Was she in Long Island?

 

[Russ Miller]: She was in Long Island, yeah. And it was bizarre, it was so bizarre. I was living in New Jersey, I was working in Rutherford, New Jersey for a medical device company. No, I’m sorry, I was working for Becton Dickinson which was a medical device firm, but it was not the one, it—ended up retiring from. I was also going to school at Fairleigh Dickinson University, I was trying to get my master’s at the time.

 

So, I remember that it became big news and I—the news travelled really fast. And so, they asked me to speak at Fairleigh Dickinson. Was it the next night? Or something like that. The sequence of events was bizarre. So, the next night, I was talking in front of the student population at Fairleigh Dickinson University. I’m standing up on a—with my madras bell-bottom pants. I look down, and an ex-girlfriend from Michigan State who is going for her doctorate in Philadelphia, had heard about it also, and she was up there. All of I sudden, I looked down, and there’s Ethel, standing under me! What are you doing? How did she know I was even here? You know, because we weren’t dating, we weren’t even talking. We were friends, but we were heading off our different ways. It was just a series of amazing events over the next week. I mean just amazing events. I remember—

 

[Interviewer]: Did you take off work?

 

[Russ Miller]: I did, I did. And then I remember being approached by Ted Kennedy’s office. And there was a lady named Sylvia Wright who worked for Life magazine. And so, Ted Kennedy invited me to come down to D.C. for a big demonstration and Sylvia asked if she could come with me. So, she and I went down to D.C., this is a couple of days after, after the shootings. It was like, you know, thousands and thousands of people were there. And, like, I met Mrs. Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, and then—and a whole bunch of guys who I became familiar with, senators and stuff like that, after a short period of time. Then I—

 

[Interviewer]: You must’ve still been in shock.

 

[Russ Miller]: Oh, I was totally—the world was spinning around me, spinning around. It gets even better. Because now I come back from that, it was like a one-day event down there, and I come back to my mom—she lived in an apartment in Queens. So, I’m literally getting off the bus, coming from the airport, getting off the bus, and walking down the street—modest garden apartments. There’s a stretch limo parked in front of the apartment. And everybody in the neighborhood is sitting out on the steps. You know, and I see something is going on, I have no idea what, you know.

 

So, I just roll in, I go in and, lo and behold, there’s my mom, sitting in the living room with Nelson Rockefeller, who was the governor of New York at the time. And a guy named Louis Lefkowitz, who was the attorney general of the City of New York. Or was it the state of New York? Anyway, we spent the next, four hours just schmoozing. Sitting on the floor of my mom’s living room, all of us, just telling stories. I was telling them what happened in D.C., and Nelson Rockefeller was telling me about how, yeah, he was really harsh on drugs in New York—governor of New York. And his son had died of an overdose. So, that was his passion, to come down on—harsher penalties for drug possession, blah, blah. But it was a crazy time. We became buds, Nelson Rockefeller and I. I would tell—I once did a spiel here at Kent, and I recited that story. And then I would say, “But he was a Republican, which was okay, but I still liked him.” Even then, I was very liberal, everybody in my family was very liberal. And I remember that year, that was the same year that they had the draft lottery. I think the first lottery may have been the year before.

 

[Editor’s note: Russ Miller pauses the interview briefly to check a text message on his phone]

 

I think, the year before, I had a medical deferment because I was working for a medical device company. But, by the year 1970, all those—you know, you could be a teacher—that was no longer a valid excuse to get out of the war. In fact, I used to think about the National Guardsmen as—because, in my world in 1966-67, you could escape going to Vietnam by joining the local National Guard. My premise—my presumption was that the guys that were doing that were just like me. They were doing what they’re doing just because it was an opportunity to escape going to Vietnam. So, I really didn’t see who they were until much later when I started going to Cleveland to see these people in person, in the court, and realized that these were not kids just like me.

 

[Interviewer]: In the trials, yeah.

 

[Russ Miller]: By 1970, my classification went to 1-A. 1-A, my deferment was gone, and the lottery was coming up. I would go into Nelson Rockefeller’s office and I would talk to his staff. I suspect that, if my number had come up, they probably would have helped out. You know, the old conversation about if you have two brothers, can it be the last brother? But it wasn’t really. But the point was that he hadn’t died in the war, you could argue that that wasn’t part of the war, so that that rule didn’t apply. There was some guy who had died in the war in World War I or II and that was the precedent for that, not letting the last kid. My brother and I were the only two siblings.

 

It turned out that—it turned out that my number came up late and they didn’t quite make it to me. So, I didn’t get drafted. I spent that summer working, but also attending–anti-war rallies—I was never the activist type. I was that capitalist guy who was thinking more about working for a living and still kind of believing that the government was doing what they had to do. If we were doing it, if we were over there, we probably should be over there. But I remember attending these grand demonstrations—my god, I remember us sitting in Central Park, in front of 10,000 people, there’s a half-shell in Central Park. And Jane Fonda was sitting next to me, and I’m supposed to be really somber because this is like a couple of weeks after the shootings, and I’m thinking, Wow, is she hot! But I never—I couldn’t even talk to her.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s funny.

 

[Russ Miller]: She was sitting closer than I am to you, but I couldn’t talk to her. She was “Hanoi Jane” at that point. That was enough for that. It was odd because the activist population was really trying to get me involved. Obviously, I’m the brother of the most high-profile kid who was killed at Kent. And it just wasn’t my nature, to go out there [unintelligible]— I remember, oh my god—

 

[Interviewer]: And you had a job—

 

[Russ Miller]: I had a job, but no—good segue. Because I worked for Becton Dickinson, I went to school at Fairleigh Dickinson University. The guy who was the CEO of Becton Dickinson was a guy named Fairleigh Dickinson, who was a state senator in New Jersey—with huge, deep pockets, okay. So, the folks in the anti-war movement coerced me into going up and asking him for big money, and that was so not my nature. When I got an opportunity to go up and talk to him in the penthouse suite there, and I did ask him to—donate $10,000 to the cause. He graciously declined, but I felt like such a dodo for even asking. I mean, I didn’t lose my job. He just said—he didn’t. The bottom line was he didn’t. I can’t tell you the ins and outs because I don’t remember them in that level of detail.

 

[Interviewer]: But he declined and it was graceful.

 

[Russ Miller]: It was an odd summer. It was one crazy event after another. And it just flew by. It’s crazy, when you think of it. Oh, and by the way, I met my wife on May 1st.

 

[Interviewer]: No!

 

[Russ Miller]: I swear to god. I met my wife on the Friday before the shootings, which were on a Monday. I went to an all-night film festival in the gym at Fairleigh Dickinson University. This might be of absolutely no use to the people that are listening to this, but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was playing, and I went with a buddy of mine. The girl that I was dating came with a friend of hers. So, here we are at eleven o’clock at night on Friday night, sitting on the floor of a gym, watching Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The craziest thing was that my girlfriend, her name was Pam, she wanted to get married and I didn’t. If you had asked me, I was twenty-three, I says, “I will no way be married before I’m thirty.” I could not stay in love for more than thirty seconds. And she wanted to get married. So, she said, “This ex-boyfriend—wants to get married to me.” And I said, “You know what? Pam, I’m not ready.” She goes off with him and we ended up, not very long later, kind of breaking up. And then, I said, “Would you mind if I asked your friend that was there that night at the gym, if I could go out with her?” Suffice to say, I fell head over heels in love. So, I ended up dating her in—like in July and getting engaged in September and getting married in February.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my goodness.

 

[Russ Miller]: For a guy that said he was not going to get married until he’s—talk about falling flat on my face into that one. That was, and then I was married for thirty-seven years. It was a crazy—

 

[Interviewer]: So, that was all happening in your life at the same time—

 

[Russ Miller]: All concurrently, everything was happening concurrently. You had the Kent thing, the aftermath of the Kent thing, I was falling in love, and it was, like, bizarro. 

 

[Interviewer]: And people were making demands on your time—

 

[Russ Miller]: Constantly, so it was very public.

 

[Interviewer]: But then, there’s also your mother and your grandmother. How were they? You wanted to be there for them?

 

[Russ Miller]: The effect of Kent on my, on our family was crazy. My dad, he was a linotyper—excuse me.

 

[Interviewer]: No, go ahead, take a break.

 

[Russ Miller]: A linotype operator at the New York Times. So, a guy that sets the print.

 

[Interviewer]: I know exactly what he did.

 

[Russ Miller]: Okay. He was a linotype operator, and then eventually became a teletype operator. And I used to go when I was a little kid, I used to go in and I’d be, I’d be at labor union meetings with these guys who are going crazy, it’s like Nikita Khrushchev banging his foot—his shoe on the table, because you asked for the world—it’s like Donald Trump today. You’d say, “I want—take two points off on the interest rate,” and, you know, really hoping that you’ll get a quarter of a point off. We don’t want to go there, though. We could go on for hours. So, where am I? I just lost my train of thought.

 

[Interviewer]: Your father at the—

 

[Russ Miller]: Oh, yes! So, it was—my dad, never saw eye [editor’s clarification: eye to eye] with my brother and myself and my mom. So, it was always a conversation, whatever the issue was. It was my dad against the three of us. And we were constantly, bang, bang, bang. And he was working—and he worked long hours—we were living in Long Island, so it was like, you get out of work at five o’clock, and my mom picked him up at the train station at like seven thirty. I mean, it was like, such a long commute. Even though we were only twenty-five miles from the city, the Long Island railroad is a terrible thing.

 

When Kent occurred, fast forwarded to that, he ended up, his immediate reaction was—to say he said they deserved it is overstating it a little bit, but he basically didn’t give Jeff the benefit of the doubt at all. And that was, that was it. My parents had, basically had decided to break up two years prior to that. So, they were already, probably divorced at that point. Oh yeah, they were divorced at that point. Oh yeah, they were well divorced at that point, because my mom ended up remarrying a year later. So that was just crazy. Oh my god, I’m thinking of so many things at the same time. I hesitate because my mind is racing in sixteen directions.

 

[Interviewer]: We can always go back.

 

[Russ Miller]: Just to put—it actually puts a Kent State connection to it. My mom passed away, as I’m sure you know, last May. Literally, two weeks after she passes away, my daughter-in-law gives me a call. She’s saying, there’s this lady in Long Island is trying to reach me. And she knows I live in Massachusetts, so she’s calling all of the Millers in Massachusetts until she connects with me. And she got through to my son, who happens to also live in Massachusetts. So, Dani, my daughter-in-law Dani, gives me the number of this lady and I call her. It turns out that her mom is also, like, ninety-six years old, she had just passed away, and this lady is cleaning out her attic. Her mom had dated my dad from like 1970, after my dad and my mom got divorced. I didn’t even know this lady existed. He was dating this woman’s mom for, like, four years.

 

[Interviewer]: In the early Seventies.

 

[Russ Miller]: In the early Seventies. And she had been going through her mom’s attic, and she finds this treasure trove of pictures, that my dad had left there. Why did he leave them there? Because he had now been long since separated. He must have just forgotten that he left them there.

 

[Interviewer]: He may have forgotten.

 

[Russ Miller]: These are pictures that go back to, like, 1945. All my baby pictures, my—Jeff’s baby pictures. Pictures of him in his army uniform, standing next to a plane. Pictures of my mom when she was a total babe at twenty-six. I mean, crazy stuff. We found not only pictures, and mostly slides, which, some of which is going to Kent for this thing you’re putting together for the fall. It was always talk about this letter we that had from Nixon, which I thought was long gone, we knew about the letter from Nixon—you know about this?

 

[Interviewer]: No.

 

[Russ Miller]: So, Nixon had sent a letter to our family, you know, like on May 5^th, apologizing for the situation—nobody’s taking any blame, but they’re just saying, “What a sad day,” blah, blah, blah. And we said, “Jeez, it’s too bad that disappeared. Dad probably had it, it’s long gone.” Okay? Well, in that treasure box was what appears to be the original letter. Okay? Also, there’s a letter that was signed by about twenty guys, who, clearly, are the Guardsmen. Nobody knows about this. And I didn’t know—I never heard of such a thing. I couldn’t even be a hundred percent certain except that I sent a cover letter—when I sent everything to Heidi Summerlin two months ago, saying, if you guys can verify—all you have to do is look at the names of the Guards, and you can verify that these, in fact, were the Guards. But the way the letter was written, it was clearly the Guards. And again, it was just saying, It was a terrible day, blah, blah, blah. But nobody’s assuming any blame here. So, that was just weird. So, I’ve got all these—

 

[Interviewer]: So, all of that was with these things your father had?

 

[Russ Miller]: Yeah, original copies of Time magazine and Life magazine. And just stuff.

 

[Interviewer]: Now I understand why this person was calling every Miller—

 

[Russ Miller]: Oh yeah, she said, I got to get through to this guy Russ.

 

[Interviewer]: —in the state of New Jersey.

 

[Russ Miller]: And we met. So, she, basically, we spent an hour on the phone, and she says, “I’m going up with my husband to meet some family up in New Hampshire, like next week.” I said, “Well, shit. Why don’t we just meet at, you know, you going to come up from New York, you’ll pass right by my house within ten miles, why don’t we just meet for lunch?” And that’s how we did that. It, really, I’ve got a picture of me—

 

[Interviewer]: And when was this? This was very recently, yeah?

 

[Russ Miller]: This was two weeks after my mom died, which is a terrible shame. But it’s also two weeks before the party that we had for my mom. We had a memorial party for my mom, in Queens, New York. And I had just enough time to sift through it, get the pictures turned into prints, and we made these great poster boards. And all of my mom’s friends know my mom from later in life, okay, from like when we moved to Long Island. They hardly know my dad, because my mom ended up—the guy that my mom ended up marrying was a guy—my mom was a guidance secretary in my high school. So, I could go down there and I can get hall passes. And Arti, Arti Holstein, was a guidance counselor. There was no funny stuff going on. After my mom got divorced, she and Arti ended up starting to date, and they got married. I got married on Valentine’s Day of 1971. And they got married on April 1st of 1971, so we almost had a two-for. That was interesting.

 

[Interviewer]: Just a complete year of people—for your family—change.

 

[Russ Miller]: But the point I was getting to was that I had all these pictures from the early Fifties: 1948, ‘49, ‘52, ‘53, that none of these people knew my mom back, back then. These are people that, when we moved—in 1960, we moved to Long Island from the Bronx, and all of her friends were in the school system. Okay? Arti ended up going from being a guidance counselor to a principal. Or was he just the assistant principal? But the point is, he was, he was an educator for the whole time. So, it was just crazy—so, these people were entranced with these pictures of my mom.

 

[Interviewer]: Pictures of her when she was twenty-six.

 

[Russ Miller]: The only shame is that she was gone. So, it’s another bit of weird. It was surrealistic, and it was kind of—it was nice in its own, crazy way. I mean, my son—I’m mix-matching another situation, so forget about that.

 

[Interviewer]: It’s fine. Okay, we’ll save that for later.

 

[Russ Miller]: So, where am I?

 

[Interviewer]: So, how was your mom? What was that summer like for your mom?

 

[Russ Miller]: My mom, we were survivors. You know, Arthur Krause was very bitter, forevermore. From 1970 to the end of his life. That I know, we were never close. But everything I heard about him, and I only saw him like once every couple of years when I was here, says he just never quite got over it. And we’re just the opposites. We tend to look—glasses half-full type stuff. And we realize you can still be happy. And shit happens to everybody, you know? Yeah, so I lost my brother in a very—I would say to people and they say, “How sad.” And, to this day, people say, “I’m so sorry.” And I say, “You know what? You could’ve had a brother and he got hit by a truck and nobody knows, cares, or whatever, it’s like, invisible.” And here I am, forty-five, fifty years later, people are still saying how sorry they are for me, and I almost feel guilty.

 

[Interviewer]: Interesting.

 

[Russ Miller]: I remember, at the funeral, the funeral was very high profile. It was in Manhattan and it was well-attended by the media and everybody. I remember after we left the church—temple—and we’re driving up Broadway. In hindsight, it looks like a 100,000 people are out there. People are hanging out windows, it was like, it was like a Macy’s day parade—and people are, you know, touching the car and giving me the peace sign and stuff like that. It was just so surrealistic. It’s just another memory in a bank of fast-acting memories. You know, we all have our lives, and that was—our life is unique, in that regard.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely.

 

[Russ Miller]: It’s amazing.

 

[Interviewer]: What about your grandmother?

 

[Russ Miller]: She was also a glass-is-half-full lady, and we—when did my—my grandfather passed away when I was in college. So, he had been gone for about two years, maybe three years, at that point. But she was a good person and she had lots of friends, and she was very—she ended up dying at eighty-five, but she was very healthy. I mean, she and I, she and I could sit on a barstool and schmooze! We had a wonderful relationship. My grandfather was the greatest guy I’ve ever known. And so, we had a wonderful small but really tight family. Everybody in our family had two kids. Nobody had any real catastrophes until this.

 

[Interviewer]: Until that.

 

[Russ Miller]: So, we did a lot of stuff together.

 

[Interviewer]: That was your mother’s parents?

 

[Russ Miller]: My mom’s parents, yeah. My dad’s—you know what’s crazy—I could talk for hours.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s fine.

 

[Russ Miller]: On my dad’s side, he had a sister who was ten years older than him, and they lived in Mount Vernon, which is a northern suburb of New York City. When I was a little kid, we used to all play. They had three kids and they were either my age—Jeff was a little younger than the youngest of them. But we did wonderful things together. And Judy, who is the middle one—

 

[Interviewer]: Of your cousins?

 

[Russ Miller]: Cousins. And they—we stayed close, for the longest time. Even after my mom and dad were—had gotten estranged. They understood Dad was a peculiar kind of guy, you know, “We still love him, be we also still love you, and so let’s keep everything going together.” They ended up—we still connected all the time. And then, somewhere about twenty-five years ago, they just moved. It was before Google, and you couldn’t—there’s no forwarding address, they disappeared from the planet.

 

[Interviewer]: What?

 

[Russ Miller]: All of a sudden, I called them and they couldn’t reach them. They were gone. No forwarding address. But I had been to their son’s wedding in probably 1990, something like that. About three months ago, their son found me on Facebook, he decided that he was just going to do a project where he going to search out all the relatives. His name is Adam Grayson. He said, “Russ, how you doing?” And I said, “Oh my god!” And I said—and my first thought is, Is Judy still with us? You know? And he said, “Yeah, he says, mom and dad are fine. They moved to Delray Beach, Florida.” Well, it turns out that my girlfriend was raised in Delray Beach, Florida, and we were going to go to Florida, to—because I—what I would do is I would take my mom down on the 1^st of February every year, with her car, and then leave her there for two months, and then I’d fly back down at the end of March and—

 

[Interviewer]: Get her.

 

[Russ Miller]: —drive her home. And we had had her—and Susan’s sister still lives in Delray Beach. So, we had already arranged that we were going to spend a couple days in Delray Beach. So, I said, “Judy, you won’t believe this, but we’re going to see you in three weeks, we’re going down!” This is like late January. “We’re going to be in Delray in three weeks.” So, we had a wonderful time and I got pictures in my camera, and it was, it was fantastic, because they were sweethearts, Judy and Alan Grayson are just sweethearts. She just turned eighty and he just turned eighty-eight. So, they were all a little older. But still great folks.

 

[Interviewer]: On your dad’s side, yeah.

 

[Russ Miller]: On my dad’s side. But my dad, we had gotten so estranged that I, when my dad ended up connecting with another woman, and there were a couple of years there—he just had no interest in—when my son Jeff was born, he would come over and visit, and he just didn’t have his heart in it. I have pictures of him holding Jeff when Jeff was a newborn, and he just didn’t—it was like pulling teeth. Nobody was winning the game. So, for our mutual sake, we just drifted apart. Because it was painful on both sides.

 

[Interviewer]: And this is, sorry, you and your father?

 

[Russ Miller]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: I’m sorry.

 

[Russ Miller]: Then he’s off, then he’s with this Rita person. I never heard about the lady that I was telling you about. This the mid-late Seventies.

 

[Interviewer]: Let alone met her, you’d never met her, never even heard of her.

 

[Russ Miller]: Right. Never even heard of her. Literally, I found out that he had passed away a couple of years after he passed away. Rita never told us, nobody ever told us. It was like, we agree to disagree, or just to go our own ways. So, it was a little weird. It was a little weird.

 

Oh! Here’s the kicker on that story. So, I’m talking to this woman whose mom had dated my dad. And she knew an entirely different person. I knew my dad as a very angry person—kind of like Art Krause kind of guy. He was very debonair, he did like, wedding and bar mitzvahs as a photographer, and he could charm the hell off of the bride and the mother of the bride. He was handsome, he is charismatic, but at home he was, he says, “Who took my fudgesicle?” It was just crazy, crazy. But this woman knew my dad as a totally loving and nice person. And I said, “Son of a bitch, I wish I had known!” I wish my dad could finally just kind of—if we could step back in time and just kind of connect now, we could talk about some of the things. Because I just knew him how—it just killed the relationship when he took Jeff’s death so poorly. I mean, you’d say, “Who the hell could possibly say he deserved it—as the father?” Certainly, we didn’t buy into that, and even at the wedding, we sat at different ends of the table. So, it was crazy, crazy. So, it’s sad, very sad, that that whole relationship never really turned into—it just kind of dissolved.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely. And I’m guessing his relationship with your brother, if your brother was the more—he was on the liberal side of the family, and he was maybe more activist than you were—

 

[Russ Miller]: He didn’t get along with my dad. But, go back to the days where I was out at Michigan State, you know, so that whole ’64 to ‘68 I was away, except for holidays. And Jeff was still at home. They were never on the same page, never on the same page. So, it was just awkward.

 

[Interviewer]: Family arguments, generation gap, a story that was common in many teenagers’ families.

 

[Russ Miller]: I’m sure, we don’t have a corner on that market. So, yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: I just have to say, since I work in an archive, that story of this cache of things that your father had, that’s both the archivist’s worst nightmare, and the best dream that someone realized the importance of these things—

 

[Russ Miller]: It’s a crazy story!

 

[Interviewer]: —and was willing to go to that extent to find you guys.

 

[Russ Miller]: She was so passionate; she was so diligent in finding me.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s incredible. Yeah, thank goodness.

 

[Russ Miller]: It was cool.

 

[Interviewer]: Especially for your family.

 

[Russ Miller]: I can pull out our pictures from the day we met at lunch. But, that’s okay.

 

[Interviewer]: One thing I’m curious about, just from, I mean, if it were a funeral in my family, and there’s that kind of—you’re in the public spotlight—there must have been a time after that where you just were able to just be together with just your family and escape from all that.

 

[Russ Miller]: Well, we really had a very close family. My mom and I were incredibly close. When Jeff was alive, the three of us were incredibly close. We did stuff together and we thought—politically, we were on the exact same page. Nobody was very authoritarian. It was very—loosey-goosey family relationship, nobody told me, You can’t get up from the table until you finish your food, and all that stuff. We had a relationship based upon—even when we were kids—and I still raise my kids that way. You know, I’m not going to tell them you can’t do it because I’m the daddy and you’re the kid. It had to make sense. Don’t ask for things that don’t make any sense. Because they’ll just tell you to go screw. You know? And so, my kids, my son raises his kid well. My daughter’s a little bit more strict than my son, with her kids. But we’re all very close to this day. I’m very fortunate in that I live in Boston, and my kids have both ended up landing in Boston area, so they both live within twenty-five minutes of me. They both have two kids, so I’ve got four grandkids and I see them all regularly. It’s a wonderful thing.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s wonderful, that’s good.

 

[Russ Miller]: They’re just starting to let me babysit. I tried to make a plan. Because I’m—being a guy, you know—you don’t trust the boy as much as if I was a girl—to watch the grandkids.

 

[Interviewer]: Do you know how to change a diaper?

 

[Russ Miller]: Yeah. And it’s not like I didn’t change diapers for you guys, remember? But right now, I’m clueless as far as they’re concerned. I can figure it out. So, I decided, just two weeks ago, to make an event where I would just take the older kids, the seven-year-old and the six-year-old, to the Big Apple Circus—was in town for a month in the Boston area. I said, “How about Susan and I take Rachel and Allie to the circus?” And Rachel’s all in, Jeff’s daughter. And Jamie’s daughter, she is very aloof, and she’s weird. I mean, this applies to her grandparents on the other side, too. She’s just—

 

[Interviewer]: Cautious?

 

[Russ Miller]: —cautious. She runs away to the other room. And every time I come over to give her a hug, she punches me in the stomach. She thinks that’s cute. There’s not any malicious intent, but she—it’s just weird. And then, regarding this Big Apple Circus, she said—Jamie said, “She only will go if I go with her. She wants to be with her mommy.” And that wasn’t the point. The point was to spend quality time with her, Susan and I and Rachel. The four of us could’ve had a good old time. But if she’s going to be with her mommy, first of all, what do I—how do I deal with that one? Because I’d have to un-invite Susan, because I have four tickets. So, we decided that instead, that Rachel—Allie needs to learn that there are consequences. So, if you don’t want to go, that’s fine, you don’t go. So, Jeff ends up—my son Jeff takes the ticket—and we have an eleven-month-old, and so she can come in on his lap. So, we went to the circus with seven-year-old Rachel, my son, and little Audrey, and Susan, and had a great old time. Maybe next year Allie will buy in. She still hasn’t quite made it to that place. And I’m still not allowed to completely babysit. They can go to the movies and I’ll watch them, but as long as we can call each other on the cell. But that’s about the extent of it so far.

 

[Interviewer]: I’m sure you’ll get your wings soon.

 

[Russ Miller]: Eventually. I’m an okay person, I’m not one of these people that just going to hang them out like, like Michael Jackson, hang them out the window or anything.

 

[Interviewer]: New parents can be nervous, as you know. Is there anything that comes to mind that you—I want you to be able to eat dinner before other things happen today on campus. Is there anything else that comes to mind that we haven’t touched on, that you’d like to say? And, again, we can always do a part two at a later date.

 

[Russ Miller]: Yeah, that’s right. And as I was talking to Susan, you know, when it got to like, four o’clock, four fifteen, I says, you know, even if we just spend fifteen minutes together, we could always more easily then reconnect on the phone.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely.

 

[Russ Miller]: That’s fine, you’re right.

 

[Interviewer]: So, we can stop here.

 

[Russ Miller]: Yeah, because right now, I’m just struggling to see where—what do we want to turn this conversation towards. I can tell you one thing, that Jeff was brilliant. My brother skipped a grade, he had ridiculous SAT scores, he was just really bright. And that was cool. The biggest question, one of the biggest questions is: what would he have become? It was weird. And would he have suffered the consequences of running off to Canada, because he was really serious about that, and a lot of people paid a big price for that.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. Separation from family not the least of it.

 

[Russ Miller]: Well, also from job opportunities, from getting back—blah, blah, blah.

 

[Interviewer]: Everything else.

 

[Russ Miller]: I suspect that if you did that right now you could probably walk right into the United States. But not with Trump, maybe. So, who knows? Why don’t we table it for the moment?

 

[Interviewer]: That sounds wonderful. And I want to say thank you so much, Russ. Thank you for fitting this in to today, I really appreciate it.

 

[Russ Miller]: Well, as soon as I heard about it, I said, “Oh, that sounds like something—they might have interest in talking to me, and I would certainly have interest in talking to them.”

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely.

 

[Russ Miller]: Actually, you always want to keep the flame alive. Anyone want to hear stories about my brother? I can tell you stories about me being his big brother and protecting him and things like that. There are lots of memories of that sort.

 

[Interviewer]: I look forward to part two then, definitely. Thank you.

 

[End of interview]

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